Les pépites / Little Gems

Wednesday, December 13 at 6:30 p.m.
$7 Members / $10 Non-Members / Includes a glass of French wine
54 W. Chicago Avenue

This event is possible thanks to:

Online registration is closed but walk-ins are welcome. Merci !

With Kai-Duc Luong and Asian Pop Up Cinema • In French with English subtitles

Les pépites / Little Gems by Xavier de Lauzanne (2016, 98 min.)

Today, they are 25 years old and have finished school or already started working. When they were children, they all had to scavenge for survival in the trash dump of Phnom-Penh. This is where a couple of French travelers, Christian and Marie-France, met them for the first time. They have worked relentlessly ever since to change more than 10,000 children's lives and help them build their future.

"Les Pépites is one of those documentaries, and there are not so many, giving us faith in humanity." – Telerama

Born in 1975 in Phnom-Penh, Kai-Duc Luong fled the oppressive Khmer Rouge regime from Cambodia to Vietnam to France, where his family settled in Paris, in 1978. An award-wining video artist and photographer exhibited around the world, he shares his time between Chicago and Paris.

At a time when alternative facts are all the rage, we return to cinéma-vérité and the documentary form at large to examine the world we live in and the people we live with.

Revisit works by seasoned French directors, such as New Wave's Agnès Varda, and discover some of the best of a booming new generation of filmmakers consistently singled out for praise by the international press.

Don't miss out on young Chicago filmmakers with a selection of short documentaries curated by the Chicago International Film Festival and presented prior to each feature. Join our guest speakers as they shed light on facts often stranger than fiction and become a critic during our post-screening discussions

Are you ready? Because anything can happen when you walk out, camera in hand, to meet reality…